US DOE says test shows potential for natgas hydrates

[Rune]

Reuters

May 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department on Wednesday announced a breakthrough in research into tapping a possibly vast fuel resource that could eventually bolster already massive U.S. natural gas reserves.

By injecting a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a methane hydrate formation on Alaska's North Slope, the department was able to produce a steady flow of natural gas in the first field test of this method. The test was done from mid-February to about mid-April this year

Gerald Holder, dean of the engineering program at University of Pittsburgh and who has worked with the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory on the hydrate issue, said before this announcement he had been skeptical about what researchers would be able to accomplish.

He said the main problem until now was finding a way to extract natural gas from solid hydrates without adding a whole lot of steps that made the process too expensive, so the success of this new test is significant.

"It makes the possibility of recovering methane from hydrates much more likely," Holder said. "It's a long way off, but this could have huge impact on availability of natural gas."

Innovation marches on.

[Lore]

I use to show potential too! What happened?

Wern't we suppose to be in the rapture of cellulosic ethanol at this point in time?

Shell trims cellulosic ethanol venture

Royal Dutch Shell PLC is withdrawing from plans to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in Canada through Iogen Energy, which it jointly owns with Iogen Corp. of Ottawa.

It said a “refocusing” of Iogen Energy’s strategy will result in a diminished development program and 150 layoffs.

“Shell continues to explore multiple pathways to find a commercial solution for the production of advanced biofuels on an industrial scale, but the company will not pursue the project it has had under development to build a larger scale cellulosic ethanol facility in southern Manitoba,” the oil company said.

Iogen Corp. plans to expand its services with “new technology for the production of advanced and cellulosic biofuels,” Shell said.

At one of its service stations in Ottawa, Shell briefly sold gasoline containing cellulosic ethanol made from wheat straw at an Iogen Energy demonstration plant in the same city (OGJ Online, June 10, 2009).

http://www.ogj.com/articles/2012/05/she ... nture.html

[dbruning]

While I bet the methane deposits hold a ton of energy, wouldn't mining this stuff and burning it have wicked environmental problems?

I mean, there have been a great deal of concern and discussion about these deposits being disturbed and causing a deadly planetary methane burp....and now we'll mine them? Of course methane is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, which is what gets released (along with water) if it's burned, so maybe if it is the big threat we're worried about, maybe burning it will lower the damage potential?

Anyone else have their heads swim from all the potential badness in the world these days? With so many different things to worry us, I'm betting the one that really takes a swing at us is totally missed.

[Scottie]

While I bet the methane deposits hold a ton of energy, wouldn't mining this stuff and burning it have wicked environmental problems?

Seems like if it is going to end up in the atmosphere anyway, might as well burn it and get some work out of it before it does?

http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04 ... tic-region

[pstarr]

This crap is no more possible than Saturian Space Methane. (Or cold fusion for that matter). It is a slush/mud mixture on the deepest sea floors that evaporates went brought to atmospheric pressure. This should be one of those rare moments when even the most guileless techtopian asks themselves; "gee. I wonder how money and ENERGY I would have to throw away to scrap this crap from 20,000 leagues?"

[Scottie]

This crap is no more possible than Saturian Space Methane.

Apparently not only is it possible, but it has been done. From the quoted article...

"By injecting a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen into a methane hydrate formation on Alaska's North Slope, the department was able to produce a steady flow of natural gas in the first field test of this method. The test was done from mid-February to about mid-April this year"

In a resource scarce world, it strikes me that having alternatives to depleting oil is a good thing?

[Tanada]

While I bet the methane deposits hold a ton of energy, wouldn't mining this stuff and burning it have wicked environmental problems?

I mean, there have been a great deal of concern and discussion about these deposits being disturbed and causing a deadly planetary methane burp....and now we'll mine them? Of course methane is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, which is what gets released (along with water) if it's burned, so maybe if it is the big threat we're worried about, maybe burning it will lower the damage potential?

Anyone else have their heads swim from all the potential badness in the world these days? With so many different things to worry us, I'm betting the one that really takes a swing at us is totally missed.

Russia has spent decades working on different methods of producing gas from sub permafrost hydrates because Siberia and northern Russia are rich in them. If the DOE has a method that is cost competitive with shale formation and tight sand formation natural gas that would be a huge boon for Canada and Alaska. As I understand it all of the methods that have shown promising results gassify the hydrates deep under the permafrost and extract them as regular methane gas. This allows them to be processed and introduced to the existing distribution pipeline network quickly and easily, no massive earth moving is required. If we can safely extract some or much of the hydrates before they thaw and escape naturally we will be doing ourselves something of a favor, especially if the Clathrate Gun hypothesis is correct.

[eastbay]

This crap is no more possible than Saturian Space Methane. (Or cold fusion for that matter). It is a slush/mud mixture on the deepest sea floors that evaporates went brought to atmospheric pressure.

Well put!

$5m/y won't buy much research on the NS. Won't buy much of anything, in fact.

They're going to have to add another zero or two to their research dollars to get anyone's attention with their wild claims ... anyone serious, that is.

[Lore]

The problem with most of these ideas is that they are just not economically scalable.

[Scottie]

The problem with most of these ideas is that they are just not economically scalable.

It seems to me that things are not economically scalable until they suddenly are. Shale gas being a recent example.

As oil production winds down, prices will continue to increase, and some afternoon a thing which is not economically scalable (like methane hydrate) becomes the next boomlet. Certainly methane is a very useful energy product, and it is unlikely that humans will ignore it, as other energy commodities run short. Burn everything, we will.

[dissident]

They got a steady stream of gas but the fundamental problem of low density remains. Some numbers would have quickly put all of this into context. You need to harvest a layer distributed over thousands of square kilometers. The volume of gas per unit area is not that large. Also, unlike fracked wells or conventional wells you are not going to have the gas flow concentrated into one well head with any commercially viable quantity. So a mobile gas harvester operation is needed which is nothing like existing gas field development but a seafloor mining operation.

Clathrates are formed on the slopes of continental shelves which are unstable locations for seabed disruption. The article quotes people saying that this development is still a long way away. There are show-stopping reasons for this and once again the media does a disservice by not addressing them. No wonder people have the impression that things will work out fine. Technological and resource problems are not presented, just techno-cornucopian expectations of a utopian future.

[Tanada]

They got a steady stream of gas but the fundamental problem of low density remains. Some numbers would have quickly put all of this into context. You need to harvest a layer distributed over thousands of square kilometers. The volume of gas per unit area is not that large. Also, unlike fracked wells or conventional wells you are not going to have the gas flow concentrated into one well head with any commercially viable quantity. So a mobile gas harvester operation is needed which is nothing like existing gas field development but a seafloor mining operation.

Clathrates are formed on the slopes of continental shelves which are unstable locations for seabed disruption. The article quotes people saying that this development is still a long way away. There are show-stopping reasons for this and once again the media does a disservice by not addressing them. No wonder people have the impression that things will work out fine. Technological and resource problems are not presented, just techno-cornucopian expectations of a utopian future.

If you follow the link to the original article you will see they are working on tundra land sub permafrost clathrates, not sea floor clathrates. It seems to me that with multi branch recovery wells and whatever stimulation injection wells they are testing the process should yield results conceptually the same as the tight shale/sand gas being extracted with the new fracking techniques. In this case they are using a different method to release the gas than fracking, which does nothing for methane hydrates, but the recovery technology for the multi branch wells is already well developed. Russia and the USSR before them had some success extracting these kind of hydrates with simple two well systems where they injected steam or heated water in one well to melt the hydrates deep under ground and extract the resulting liquid for surface processing. In another example I have read about they pulled a vacuum on the extraction well causing the hydrates to destabilize and liquify for extraction.

I certainly agree that some numbers and costs would have been a big help, if it costs $10/MMU to get the clathrate gas out then it won't compete with other sources for a very long time, if on the other hand it costs $3 then it is competitive now.

[Scottie]

I certainly agree that some numbers and costs would have been a big help, if it costs $10/MMU to get the clathrate gas out then it won't compete with other sources for a very long time, if on the other hand it costs $3 then it is competitive now.

Even withoutt that large of a competitive advantage, methane is still better than using coal. Certainly the power companies are getting in on the deal, and once they begin spiking demand for natural gas, hydrates are going to continue to look better and better.

http://www.power-eng.com/articles/2012/ ... eting.html

[pstarr]

Think of the worst tight-shale play and then multiply the costs by 100x and the payback by 1/100. It's underwater right? Clathrate won't cost $5 million/well but rather $500 million. Low eroei, high drilling costs, year-one 90% depletion rate, plummeting payoff,. Tight-shale gas is all but dead (as predicted here and by Arthur Berman) and waiting only for the investors to turn blue and float to the surface. Want to buy into clathrate? Be my guest. Be OF's guest

[Lore]

I'm waiting for the next hype around oil shale to begin through some desperate techno gamble.

[seenmostofit]

Think of the worst tight-shale play and then multiply the costs by 100x and the payback by 1/100. It's underwater right?

Tanada notes that it is NOT underwater. I imagine the economics of that are quite a bit different.

[pstarr]

Think of the worst tight-shale play and then multiply the costs by 100x and the payback by 1/100. It's underwater right?

Tanada notes that it is NOT underwater. I imagine the economics of that are quite a bit different.

My question mark is rhetorical. Yes it is underwater. Or offworld, like unobtanium.

Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the Solar System where temperatures are low and water ice is common, significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth.[3]

[kublikhan]

This crap is no more possible than Saturian Space Methane.

Apparently not only is it possible, but it has been done. From the quoted article...

As Tanada mentioned, the Russians have done work with this as well. And not just a research well, Norilsk is producing commercial methane hydrate gas today. Other countries are getting into the game as well.

Deep in the Arctic Circle, in the Messoyakha gas field of western Siberia, lies a pioneer in methane hydrate extraction. Back in 1967, Russian engineers began pumping natural gas from beneath the permafrost and piping it east across the tundra to the Norilsk metal smelter, the biggest industrial enterprise in the Arctic. In 1978 they decided to wind down the operation. According to their surveys, they had sapped nearly all the methane from the deposit. But despite their estimates, the gas just kept on coming. The gas field was re-opened and continues to power Norilsk today.

Where was this methane coming from? Russian geologists initially thought it was leaking from another deposit hidden beneath the first. But their experiments revealed the opposite -- the mystery methane was seeping into the well from the icy permafrost above. If unintentionally, what they had achieved was the first, and so far only, successful exploitation of methane hydrate.

Tundra Gas - Methane

China's largest coal producer, China Shenhua Group, has launched a project to research and develop combustible ice, a kind of natural gas hydrate, in the northwestern Qinghai province. Shenhua Group signed an agreement with the Qinghai provincial government on Monday evening to start the exploration of combustible ice in the province.

China announced the first discovery of the resource under the bed of the South China Sea in May 2007. After it was discovered in Muli prefecture in Qinghai province in 2009, the Ministry of Land Resources announced that China had found combustible ice in the land-based region as well.

Experts expect China to experience a period of peak energy demand from 2020 to 2025. With further exploration, the country's prospective volume of natural gas hydrate in frozen earth regions is estimated to reach an equivalent to 35 billion tonnes of oil.

China's largest coal producer to develop "combustible ice"

[kublikhan]

While I bet the methane deposits hold a ton of energy, wouldn't mining this stuff and burning it have wicked environmental problems?

Seems like if it is going to end up in the atmosphere anyway, might as well burn it and get some work out of it before it does?

Makes sense to me. Capture the methane before it leaks into the atmosphere, and at the same time you get another fossil fuel source.

The most recent DoE experiment was innovative. They lowered well pressure to make the hydrate flow and get the gas out.

In other words, this method removed a greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and produced an energy source. Even my environmentally-conscious colleague Jeff Siegel of the Power Portfolio would give two thumbs up for that.

Methane Hydrates - More Energy than All Other Fossil Fuels Combined

One of the main arguments in favor of exploiting onshore methane hydrates deposits concerns climate change. With many parts of the world, especially the permafrost regions, experiencing increases in temperature, methane is slowly being released from these deposits into the atmosphere. The permafrost is melting at an accelerating pace and thus the release of methane is increasing exponentially. As methane is a "greenhouse" gas that has a much greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide, it is imperative to prevent as much of this methane as possible from escaping into the atmospere. Extracting the methane hydrates for use as fuel serves a doubly important purpose: it provides a much needed fuel at a time when global oil supplies appear to be dwindling and it saves the world from possibly disastrous sudden rises in temperature. By coincidence, Qinghai has been identified in scientific studies as the place with the fastest rising temperatures in the world.

Tundra Gas

[dissident]

Abstract PDF

1) The Messoyakha reservoir is a land based reservoir under a deep glacial permafrost layer (420-480 meters). This is not a typical configuration for seabed clathrates except in Arctic shelf regions such as the ESAS. So don't expect well type production.

2) According to the article abstract above it is not clear at all that the "fat tail" decline of this reservoir is due to clathrate production.

There are no seabed clathrate extraction operations that would enable an assessment of commercial viability. If people can find any news on such operations being planned then that would be really useful information.